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(LiveHacking.Com) – The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), the operational arm of the National Cyber Security Division (NCSD) at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has issued a warning about on-going distributed denial-of-service attacks against different government institutions both in the USA and in the EU. According to the reports, these attacks are being attributed to the hacker group Anonymous.
Recent attacks by the group include:
- Several Polish government web sites, including those of the Prime Minister, the President and Parliament. A Polish branch of Anonymous has already claimed responsibility for the attacks.
- The European parliament website came under cyber attack on Thursday.
- The Irish Department for Justice website and the sites of several large financial institutions
- Other targets in the last week have included Universal Music, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Recording Industry Association of America.
The attacks are motivate either by the recent shutdown of the Megaupload site or by the signing of the international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).
US-CERT encourages users and administrators to do the following to reduce the risk associated with this and other malware campaigns:
- Do not open attachments in email messages from unknown sources.
- Install anti-virus software and keep virus signatures files up to date.
- Refer to the Recognizing and Avoiding Email Scams (pdf) document for more information on avoiding email scams.
- Refer to the Avoiding Social Engineering and Phishing Attacks document for information on social engineering attacks.
- Refer to the Recovering from Viruses, Worms, and Trojan Horses document for additional information on how to recover from malware.
- Refer to the Continuing Denial of Service Threats Posed by DNS recursion (v2.0)(pdf) document and Understanding Denial-of-Service Attacks document for additional information on denial-of-service attacks.
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